Art is introduced to us at a very young age and especially while most of us have been in school there has been an emphasis on art or on keeping art in the school system. For me it was always something that was there, that you had the option to participate in or look at other people’s versions of art. The author of this weeks article posed an interesting point, “As paintings became less and less like mirrors held up to nature, so that viewers could no longer decipher or naively admire them, critics as mediators increasingly had to explain to the public what made an artwork good or bad and even what a work ‘meant’” (p. 18). There are several very interesting questions in that quote; my first one is when did art- maybe specifically paintings- become less like a mirror? Did artists find what they saw in this mirror upsetting to recreate or did they want to create a better reflection? My other question regarding this quote is when do we stop naively, as the author puts it, admiring art? I would be curious if this has anything to do with how art is presented to young children in school as well as in their home? One thing that I think our society does a relatively good job at is not putting art in a box. Meaning that art is not just painting or drawing, it is language and movement, art doesn’t really need strict guidelines. For as much as the Western part of the world is criticized it seems like we do a pretty good job of inviting art into our world, “There is no known society that does not practice at least one of what in the West we call ‘the arts’” (p. 21). There’s always room for improvement and I don’t know enough about art in other cultures but I would say that the West does a pretty good job appreciating and accepting art in all of it’s forms.